


A Killing Light

by SylvanWitch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark, Extremely Dubious Consent, Lust Potion/Spell, M/M, Non-Consensual Bondage, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 16:37:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17227568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Dosed with a lust potion, Severus clings to his last ounce of self-control as Lucius does the Dark Lord's bidding.





	A Killing Light

**Author's Note:**

> My brainsnakes wrote this: It's dark.

He wants to say, “No,” but it comes out, “Please,” even his brain, his mouth, his shaking hands betraying him now.

 

There was a time when he was untouchable.

 

Now, his skin burns for touch, even his breath inclined to tether him to another.

 

Often, he had wondered if his own touch was toxic; he’d steeped in the fumes of his laboratory, the world’s most poisonous diffusion:  Essence of Perfidy.

 

In lighter moments, he laughs at these anxiety-induced phantasms.

 

There aren’t many lighter moments these days.

 

Lucius makes everything in the dungeon darker, particles of light drawn to him alone until he seems to glow from inside, which makes sense:  There are bacteria that phosphoresce.  This man, being rotten to his core, might always have a light in the darkness.

 

Unbidden, Snape is reminded of something Albus once said to him, some platitude about hope and light.  The laugh hisses out of him; he hasn’t much strength left.

 

“Is it funny to you, that it has come to this?”  Lucius, for all his illumination, is haggard, pale like a fish-belly except for the deep pits beneath his eyes.  His hands, Snape notes with some distant satisfaction, are also shaking.  He does not want to be here either.

 

If only Snape’s skin _were_ truly lethal, he could end this for them both.  As it is, Lucius is forced into this parody of attraction, pretending to want to ravage what he once took willingly and always for granted.

 

But that was long ago, before Snape had understood what it meant to lose everything and still breathe in and out.

 

He lets go of his breath now, wishes he could stop the involuntary inflation of his lungs, stop his heart in his chest, his brain in his head.

 

Lucius’ hands are cold, a welcome contrast to the fire beneath Snape’s skin.  He’d recognized the potion Bellatrix had forced down his throat earlier by its scent—decayed gardenias and ammonia—known what was coming, had had only enough fear left to dread the Dark Lord’s personal attention.

 

Lucius’ clumsy pawing means nothing except relief from the heat Snape would deny if he could.

 

Chained to the wall as he is, he cannot touch, though he wants to as the golden head bows over the work of Lucius’ hands.  He’s freeing Snape’s hard cock from his robes and trousers, and though his hand is dry and the friction should be uncomfortable, his rough strokes mean only relief.  Snape clamps his teeth around a sound, tilts his head back against the wall, closes his eyes.

 

Lucius is breathing audibly now—something about this is getting to him, perhaps the humiliation of it or perhaps some distasteful but unavoidable arousal.  He’d always enjoyed spelling Snape’s hands to the wall (they’d never done it in a bed; that would have meant something too permanent, too real, something Lucius couldn’t pretend away and deny had ever happened); he’d liked to tear moans out of Snape, who, helpless for the moment, would writhe and mutter curses and Lucius’ name.

 

And then Snape remembers what inevitably came next—the denial of completion, the suspension there at the excruciating edge of need—and realizes where this is going.

 

It will kill him, the state he’s in, with the potion searing his blood.  It will kill him slowly, strip away every ounce of self-control, flay him down to a babbling mess of want and need. 

 

Snape has had only one thing since the nightmare of her staring, cold eyes, one thing upon which to rebuild himself—an empty façade, true, but functional:  Self-control.

 

He has never groveled nor begged, not since he had asked Albus Dumbledore for absolution and gotten damnation, prolonged and fervent, instead.

 

“No,” he says at last, denying Lucius any semblance of consent.  It is a small thing, but he feels Lucius’ hand stutter in its busywork. 

 

The eyes that look up at him are jaundiced, the lips white at their edges.

 

“What did you say?”  His patrician sneer is reduced to a thin, frail noise.  Snape almost feels sorry for him.

 

“I said, ‘No,’” Snape enunciates, his own voice thready with need.

 

Lucius’ lip curls into an ugly smirk.  “You aren’t in any position to refuse.”

 

“Nevertheless,” Snape manages, pushing the words out of him with an enormous effort of will.  “I refuse.”

 

The laugh that tears from Lucius’ belly is an awful thing, tinged with despair, almost a kind of madness.  He removes his hand, and the cold air on Snape’s aching cock makes him choke on a moan.

 

“You won’t say no for long.”  But he doesn’t sound sure.  Whatever artificial arrogance was propping Lucius up seems to have abandoned him now.  He is as diminished as any other in that dungeon.

 

Snape breathes around the agony of his desire, like a wire attaching his cock to his balls to his gut to his heart.  An invisible hand tightens that line, wringing a sound out of him.

 

Lucius smirks and shifts closer.

 

Snape stutters, “No,” from between his teeth.

 

“I don’t need your consent,” Lucius says, but he sounds uncertain, like their power has somehow been reversed, though Snape is still, as always, the one shackled to the wall, this time by unforgiving iron so cold it burns him where it pulls at the thin skin of his wrists.

 

“But you want it,” Snape guesses, and Lucius shivers and turns his face away.  It’s Snape’s turn to laugh, a graveyard sound, the rasping of a stone rolled back or fingernails on the inside of a buried casket. 

 

“Let me,” Lucius asks after a moment.  “Please.”

 

Snape wishes he understood what complex alchemy is at work between them, what threat has reduced Lucius to pleading.  He does not ask; the answer doesn’t matter.  Nothing matters but that he keep what little he has left of himself.

 

“Touch me,” he murmurs, dropping his voice into its lowest register, commanding, not asking, certainly not begging.

 

Lucius’ breath catches audibly, and his cold eyes gleam damply as he looks into Snape’s face once more.  Something like a weak hope is kindled in him, and he reaches a hesitant hand to resume the work of stripping an orgasm out of Snape.

 

“I—I c-can’t,” Lucius says a moment or an eternity later, when Snape’s hips have started following Lucius’ hand, started seeking his touch.  Heat has built at that point of contact, but though it’s Snape who is burning, sweat appears on Lucius’ brow.  “I can’t finish you.”

 

“Yes, you can, Lucius,” his voice is a tightrope, a slender connection bridging the disaster of their lives, of every bad choice that has led them to this moment.  “You’ve always been able to make me come.  You know how beautiful you are, how much I always want you.”  Half of it is lies, but the flattery is enough to revive some faint ghost of Lucius’ old superiority.

 

Lucius tightens his hand, groans and leans his head against Snape’s heaving chest.  Snape cants his hips, fucking into his grip, holding his breath, eyes squeezed shut, willing himself to come.

 

“Please,” Lucius whispers, hand loosening, as if remembering that he has a job to do.  “You’re not supposed to—.”

 

Snape cries out loudly, deliberately, releasing the pent-up wave of revulsion and lust and tension and need, and spurts a hot arc of come across Lucius’ wrist and the sleeve of his robe.

 

Lucius draws back as though scalded, but Snape hasn’t the strength to feel satisfaction.  As if Lucius’ unwilling ministrations had drained the life out of him with the last of the potion, Snape hangs in his fetters, too weak to even raise his head to see the look on Lucius’ face as he realizes their mutual undoing.

 

“It wasn’t supposed to end like this,” Lucius says eventually, and Snape finds that he has enough strength to raise his head and look at what’s left of the patriarch of Malfoy Manor.  Somehow, Lucius is more beautiful than Snape has ever seen him, as if the remaining light of the world clings to the planes of his face, the sculpted column of his throat, the straight white fall of his hair.

 

“It always ends like this for us,” Snape answers, meaning several things, none of which are comforting. 

 

Lucius closes his eyes and bows his head in forfeit—to Snape himself or simply to the truth, he doesn’t know nor care.

 

“Unbind me, Lucius,” Snape suggests, “And we’ll meet the end together.”

 

Somewhere away in the darkness beyond Lucius’ bent head, a door creaks ponderously open and ominous slithering footsteps are heard approaching Snape’s cell.

 

He has trouble holding himself up when the manacles clank open, his knees weak from exhaustion and from the liquid pleasure still turning his muscles molten.

 

Still, he puts a hand out for Lucius, turning him toward the dim outline of the cell door, through which their doom will come.  He stands beside Lucius, their shoulders just brushing.  He touches the thin, sticky skin of Lucius’ wrist, where his own spend is cooling.

 

And he waits, still himself, for the last light to go out in his world.


End file.
